A Break From The Alex Smith Drama: Urbanization Is Supersizing Spiders

City living brings with it a few shifts in lifestyle compared to rural habitation: shorter commutes, accessible shops and, often, an over-reliance on restaurant dining and fast food. Another side effect of the congested, cramped, cement-laded city life is that the temperature tends to be a little warmer year-round, a shift known as the “urban heat island” effect.

As it turns out, these changes aren’t only affecting cities’ human populations. In Australia, where spiders already have a propensity to be terrifyingly large, new research by University of Sydney PhD candidate Lizzy Lowe, says The Age, found that Sydney’s higher temperatures and easier access to food are driving the spiders to grow even bigger.

She studied the golden orb weaver in three types of environments in and around Sydney – urban parks, remnant bushland and continuous bushland. Twenty sites were studied and, for each spider web found, she assessed its proximity to man-made objects and vegetation.

Comparing the sizes of the spiders, she found that the city spiders outpaced the country spiders. And, though her research focused only on Golden orb weaver spiders, she suggests that the same effect can probably be seen in other species.

A rare species of orb weaver spider, Meta bourneti, turned up in the vaults of Londonís Highgate Cemetery where it may have been lying low for the past 150 years.

As an orb weaver, the species requires total darkness, so archeologists think the tombs made a perfect hideout for the spider, which normally lives in caves and feasts upon small insects and woodlice. According to the BBC, this is the first time M. bourneti has been recorded in London.

Around 100 spiders, measuring about 30 mm, turned up in the tombs, some of which date back to the 1830s. The discovery shows just how important urban cemeteries can be for providing refuges for wildlife, the London Wildlife Trust told the BBC.